Nice Play: LSV Street Spasms a 2/2

From M3G2 of this draft, here's Luis Scott-Vargas using Street Spasm for X=2 to kill a Tavern Swindler:

It's not that tough to see the play in retrospect, but in the moment, I'd been picturing "tap three for Ember Beast." I think my plan would have involved dying with Street Spasm in hand.

(For what it's worth, Ember Beast was a bad draw in approximately all nine games of this draft. A random 2/2 for 3 would have been better.)

Limited: More breakdown of the GP Providence finals draft

We can extrapolate a lot from the team draft chart for the GP Providence finals. All six players stuck to their original colours, to the point where they all maindecked their first four picks of the draft. I shuffled the chart around a bit to see how the decks came together.

Maindeck cards by set:

Alex John and Eric Berger each got only 6 cards out of pack 2 (Gatecrash) -- Berger because he wasn't in a Gatecrash guild, John because his neighbour Andrew Longo cut off UG.

In total, the players maindecked less of Gatecrash than the other sets, even though most of them were aiming for a Gatecrash guild (John for UG, Lax and McCullough for WR, and Phillipps for WB). The high Dragon's Maze count is inflated by the extra dual land in every pack of that set.

Maindeck cards by when they were picked:

Of his 18 "early picks," Longo played 14 -- every other player used 16 or 17. Longo hate-drafted a Mercurial Chemister, and he early-picked Steeple Roc, Inspiration, and Azorius Guildgate that all ended up missing the cut for his deck.

The late picks that made Longo's maindeck were Crosstown Courier, Deputy of Acquittals, Runner's Bane, Totally Lost, and an Azorius Keyrune -- all aggressive / tempo cards compared to the early picks he cut. Longo went 2-0 in this draft.

Dual lands:
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 11

- The highest-picked land was a 2nd-pick Rakdos Guildgate that Eric Berger took to splash Toil // Trouble with.
- The lowest-picked land was a Boros Guildgate that went 11th to Ari Lax, after Matt McCullough passed it for a Towering Thunderfist.
- 3 of the 14 dual lands in the draft were not maindecked -- including the on-colour Azorius Guildgate that stayed in Longo's sideboard.

Mana artifacts:
4, 9, 10, 12, 12, 13, 14, 14, 14

- If we only count Cluestones and Keyrunes, the highest-picked mana artifacts went 4th and 9th to Alex John for his five-colour deck. John also 1st-picked a Prophetic Prism in Gatecrash.
- 5 of the 9 mana artifacts from this draft ended up in people's decks. Longo played the Azorius Keyrune he got as his last pick of the draft.

Out-of-colour picks:
(cards picked 12 or higher that were uncastable in the player's eventual deck)

- 4 of the 6 players ran straight two-colour decks (or two colours plus a split card).

- Even though he was in a Gatecrash guild (BW), Phillipps (2-0) picked up some red cards in Gatecrash while he was in front of the red drafters for a pack. Then he was behind the red drafters again in RTR so he stuck to retreated to his normal colours. Of course, his BW deck beat both the red drafters who had cut him off.

- McCullough (0-2) drafted RGW for pack one, but then he opened all RW cards in Gatecrash and settled in those colours. He also early-picked a Cartel Aristocrat and an Augur Spree, but he never got the black Guildgates or anything else to cast them.

- Lax drafted deep WR first two packs and cut some good anti-WR in the third pack. He had the option of going black after pack one, but he took Wojek Halberdiers over Killing Glare first pick of Gatecrash and only saw WR after that.

- Lax's first two picks were red cards, passing a Putrefy and 2 Viashino Firstblades -- presumably he's hoping for RG or RB from here. Then he got passed Viashino Firstblades (which he took over two Rakdos Drakes), so he and his teammate McCullough nearby both ended up drafting the battalion deck. Their decks were OK but they went 0-3 combined.

- The 3 Druid's Deliverance and 1 Downsize in the draft were all picked off-colour, presumably by people who didn't want to play against them.

- Three of the RtR guilds were basically undrafted (BR, GR, RU), while all five of the GTC guilds were drafted. WR was fought over but ended up supporting two decks. UG was fought over and did not end up supporting two decks.

Alex John's draft:

John (0-1) drafted UG cards for his first four picks, then had to choose between a Jelenn Sphinx (UW)  and Haunter of Nightveil (UB). He took the UB card and gave his neighbour Longo the Sphinx, which inadvertently turned Longo's GW draft into a GWU draft. John then saw some "big spells" (Beck // Call, Blast of Genius) and a Cluestone, giving him the option of a multi-colour power deck while passing Longo a bunch of "small spells" in green and blue (Simic Guildgate, 2 Runner's Bane). John also got cut when Eric Phillipps took off-colour blue spells (2 Wind Drake).

Longo then took all the UG in Gatecrash, cutting John off UG completely. John had to take some lands and some black spells. He ended up with only 4 Gatecrash spells in his deck.

John entered pack 3 with a UGBrw deck in progress, without many good spells but with 4 dual lands and a Prophetic Prism. His picks were Mizzium Mortars, Runewing, Voidwielder, a Keyrune, Izzet Charm, and a Guildgate. He ended up with kind of a ramp control deck that ran 17 lands + 3 mana artifacts, needing Gobbling Ooze and Spawn of Rix Maadi to boost the creature count.

Probably if there were an RGD draft format, five-colour decks would be built around early Axebane Guardians and Gatecreeper Vines. In DGR, though, you pick most of your deck before you can see if you get those cards, so a five-colour deck needs you to do stuff like Cluestone over Ubul Sar Gatekeepers and 1st-pick Prophetic Prism. In this case, those decisions made sense; John needed every Cluestone / Guildgate / Prism he found, but not having Axebane Guardians or Gatecreeper Vines still meant he had an absurdly high creature curve (0/1/2/1/4/4).

Both John's neighbours went 2-0 with fast creature decks.

Limited: GP Providence final draft diagrams

Using the awesome draft chart in coverage, here's a diagram of the GP Providence final draft and what colours people played.

And here's a diagram showing colours and first picks out of each pack.

Video Rec: Frank Karsten stalls and waits

Starting at about 1:03:00 of this stream archive, my favourite guy Frank Karsten (with help from Marijn Lybaert) plays a really patient game, sitting mana and regenerators while saving his spells for a few turns. Of course, he eventually gets a giant advantage out of playing spells at the right time, ending with the opponent giving a funny rant about topdecks and playing a hilariously ineffective Weapon Surge.

You'll also see Karsten repeatedly alt-tabbing to the screenshot of his deck, counting the win-cards left in his library as he stalls out the board.

Karsten psychs himself up to not attack, not play anything, and not cash out Cluestone.

Karsten's stream channel also has a pretty great highlights file.

Writing: Frank Karsten is a coverage hero

A man with good ideas.

GP Gothenburg this weekend might have the best text coverage ever. I read a lot more than I expected to, and a lot more than I normally read for a limited GP in Europe. Probably some of this is from Wizards pushing to make GP coverage more readable, but a lot was because the famously brainy Frank Karsten was doing text coverage.

Some gems:

- Tobi Henke asks pros about Keyrunes versus Cluestones. It's fun writing and an interesting and relevant question.

- Karsten takes a trial-winning five-colour deck and asks pros about some sample hands. Normally I find the trial-winning decklists a bit meaningless in limited or constructed. Karsten at least used one of them as a resource to have conversations about sealed.

- Henke asks a survey question (best common in sealed). Most pros have the same boring answer (without really explaining why), but Karsten and Denniz Rachid have some compelling answers at the end.

- Henke asks a tougher survey question. "Play or draw" is super-important but doesn't often get discussed. Henke gets good answers here from top players including play-or-draw expert Florian Koch.

- Karsten covers Kenny Oberg vs. Hannes Kerem. It looks like Oberg won on a tricky combat decision, baiting out some pump spells, and Oberg is quoted explaining this well. In an average limited match. Match write-ups now focus on the games that the players found interesting, whereas they used to try and name every spell played in every game.

- Karsten's interview with the Swedish WMC team was also really cool. I don't think most people hear about the WMC qualifiers other than for their own country + the United States. A team with three pros is fun and notable, plus they gave some good answers.

- Karsten drafts with Jan van der Vegt and Mark Dictus. The draft tables are much more useful to read than the traditional paragraphs walking through draft picks (i.e., inconvenient conversion of tables into prose form).

- Karsten lists out the two-card combos in DGR that he heard about, presented in beautiful visual side-by-side. My favourite is Greenside Watcher and Verdant Haven, both commons and both probably underplayed. (Cc @travisdwoo in hopes of combo draft videos.)

- Henke interviews Jan van der Vegt and gets a clear and concise rundown of drafting strategy from someone who's clearly very good at that.

- Karsten makes a diagram of the top 8 draft to present something visually that I used to awkwardly try and figure out from Draft Viewer. I expect this kind of chart to become a regular feature of draft coverage.

Karsten and Henke should get loads of credit for doing a better job at GP text coverage than everyone else out there.

EDIT: This is also the first GP coverage to name a split card without creating a broken link.

Nice Play: Simon Goertzen casts Give

In M1G2 of his latest draft video, Simon Goertzen hits land on turn 6 and chooses to pump his Centaur token instead of drawing three cards:

(clarity: this is before playing land for the turn)

The opponent's deck has shown mostly Unleash creatures in the first game. My plan, watching, was to try and win by drawing some good spells.

Goertzen's plan, it turns out, is to use Give un-fused make a 6/6 and knock the opponent to 6 life, forcing a tough block next turn, and leaving himself the spare mana to play a Disciple of the Old Ways.

"Playing Give on the Spire Tracer doesn't make a lot of sense, because we know he has the Horror now. So we could put it on the Centaur and get in for 7, bringing our opponent down to 6, forcing him to block the Centaur next turn or have an immediate answer to it. I think that's our best line.

"The alternative would be to try to draw some additional cards here, but I don't think that's getting us very far. If we draw three here, then everything we have is basically dominated by his board, and we only bring him down to 12, so I kind of like being more aggressive here."

It's a gamble that the opponent doesn't have removal -- we haven't seen removal yet, but it hasn't really been necessary yet. We have seen a Thrill-Kill Assassin (so far uncastable) from the opponent, as well as a Psychic Strike (which might be in hand, since the opponent played no spell on turn 4).

Give + attack plays around the Psychic Strike, and by letting the Centaur get past the 3/4 blocker, it does 6 points of damage even if the Centaur doesn't live. Considering the board and the opponent's 4 cards, we don't have the best odds of winning in any case, but Goertzen makes a bold risk here to try and steal the game.

Nice Play: LSV blocks a Wasteland Viper

In M1G2 of this draft, Luis Scott-Vargas uses a 3/3 Centaur to block a 1/2 deathtouch creature and stay at 17 life:

He says, "I think rather than taking a bunch of damage and then trading for it, I should just trade for it. The Centaur's not getting in there anyway, so no reason not to."

I would never have thought of this block. I don't know if it's right, but it's clever. It's also tough to read why the opponent would be attacking with just Wasteland Viper.

Video Rec: Paul Cheon, Battalion vs. Lavinia

Match 1, Game 2 of this draft on Channel Fireball is pretty satisfying. Cheon finds marginal value every turn with his army of 1- and 2-power creatures.

A screenshot:

Paul's creatures are all detained in a Voidwalk + Lavinia loop.